[No Players] Where the Lurkers Take Their Holidays

[civac2]

Commandos are not that amazing in a straight fight. Their real power is exploiting nuclear strikes.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get my tac nukes in range of anything that mattered and also did not have the production to make ICBMs (except a single one at the end which I never got to use). In retrospect it would have been better to wait for my 4th GA to finish the Manhattan Project. The production, free switch to slavery and time to set up overflow cascades all would have helped. Oth, that would have given Mjmd more time to make use of his production advantage and I also didn't know nukes can kill GPs.

[ljubljana]

I also didn't know nukes can kill GPs.

i didn't know this either.... had to sim it out after i saw it happen to yall, to make sure my eyes weren't deceiving me  it's not like stacks either where you need to use multiple nukes, just one ICBM kills great people (and workers, and i assume other civilian units that i didn't test) almost all the time.... the only exception i found was enemy ICBMs, which apparently are immune to nuclear attack - which is good and reasonably realistic, but is far from the only way an ICBM can be used to ruin an opponent's second-strike capability as we saw. and i suppose they didn't need to nuke your GP outright either, nuking prussa with the national epic in the initial first strike probably would have sufficed to deny the GA for the rest of the game due to the way GPP math works...

even worse, the ability to hit GPs produces a really pernicious incentive to play clock games. if you had 3 GPs sitting around but hidden somewhere (on caravels in the middle of nowhere and the like), it would be massively in mjmd's best interest to seize the first position in the turn order. that way they can nuke your 4th GP in the city as it spawns, instead of giving you a chance to hide on a ship. (at least, i think so? but actually, on the turn your last great spy spawned in prussa, i looked for it there before you had played that round and couldn't find it, and actually never saw it again for the rest of the game...? would love to hear what you did with it, if you remember)

i was also pretty unimpressed by tac nukes in this game. did you ever find a use for one that was cost-efficient? 4 range is really limiting even compared to something like 5, if i am recalling correctly ankyra/kirishima was the only pair of our border cities that could have ranged one another. maybe if i had built forts near the indian border you could have rebased them there, but naturally that didn't occur to me at the time (and i'm not sure if it even works)

[Mjmd]

2) I think 2g/city I would be willing to try. I'm on the fence if this should just be for mining inc / creatcon or if it should include cereal mills / maybe sushi (if can be coded separately but as each is its own building seems like yes?). The main thing is with the hammer ones is you can build wealth to offset easier. Sure the food ones you CAN work specialists, but that requires your cities to be bigger so your paying extra maintenance already and there is time to grow to those specialists. I have wondered about a specialist food based economy in the late game, but up to someone in the future to try.

5) Don't have your great people near anything. Although if this can be modded sure why not. I don't think its happened before this game and I doubt it comes up much, but sure.

@Xist not stacking your units is 100% a valid counter play. PB66 and PB75 I didn't have stacks hit. Nauf didn't stack more than 12 modern units together and never got hit. I think the most I ever got hit by Civac was 2 naval units together. Now I did get greedy and group up going around the SE corner, but that was after he had launched quite a few so I took the risk. Nukes against cities are actually not very good. I think PB66 illustrates this best. I lost my wall street oxford city and my heroic epic Kremlin city to ICBMs. I built less overall nukes than Plemo and was widely regarded as being in 2nd going into that war. I used my nukes to kill units and actually capture territory. That was an even ish fight. Here it wasn't even. I had all the late game things and had "extra" nukes to use against my biggest rival. Think about it this way, you whip your own city halfway and spend 1500 production. Sure nuking a city you even up the pop loss, but Its not guaranteed you will get the worthwhile buildings. Oxford and wall street both survived two ICBMS in PB66. I was actually happy about it until the next turn paratrooper GG because I was an idiot and didn't regarrison (but I digress). I also lost a boatload of production and commerce each time I was in slavery. Nuking cities just to injure them just isn't efficient. It actually didn't matter to me if Civac nuked a cultural city this game. I'll go into this more in my thread, but it was probably stupid to do culture anyways. Nukes clearing out my ships I was much more worried about because then tactical nukes off subs with transports could threaten my coastal cultural city (or even 2nd city jpj with a general). Just kill the units and get the positioning.


And WOW at the number of Commandos. And yes its funny only my gg one got to have fun.

@Ljub I've tried for commando factories, but personally never actually got one up and running. This game had more immediate need for them so didn't even consider. IE I did not consider it to be the correct choice for my situation. This might be the first game in a long time to get 1 online let alone 3!!!

@Ljub I used tactical nukes extensively to effect in PB66 see thread for details. I don't think Civac ever got a good shot on anything of mine as stated to Xist above.

[ljubljana]

@Ljub I've tried for commando factories, but personally never actually got one up and running. This game had more immediate need for them so didn't even consider. IE I did not consider it to be the correct choice for my situation. This might be the first game in a long time to get 1 online let alone 3!!!

i don't know if you even could have in this game - not enough GGs available. the difference between AGG and CHA needing 3 GGs vs 6 for other traits (and that's with vassalage + theo) really is the difference between "will be feasible most games" and "will be impossible in the vast majority of cases".... i think this is just the one game in a while where 3 different AGG or CHA players survived this long. big big reason to consider playing one of these traits if games go long IMO, i don't think we really got to see it in this game but if there were a power that was otherwise comparable to you in tech and production but had a commando factory online, i bet they win in a 1v1 war off the strength of that

PS, one of my GGs was settled for me by GT in aksum, which is why i chose to place my ultra-valuable commando factory right on the american border and then obsess paranoidly over its security all game lol

[Mjmd]

It certainly is a consideration for those traits, but you still won't see me taking aggressive in a big game. I do like the cha is just like this swiss army knife of doing a little of everything and having little upsides.

I think I had 7 ggs. 1 super medic. 1 spread out exp to help me hold vs SD (edit think it was 2), 3 settled (HE, ironworks, and 1 in Gav capital which also had one prior settled for 10exp ships). 2 for commandos.

[ljubljana]

yeah, about 200 turns in when i saw ginger's army assembling for the invasion of drey i had this moment of horrible realization along the lines of "wait.... why on earth did i take AGG, which gets a third promo on melee and gunpowder, over CHA, which for the low low price of vassalage gets a third promo on CAVALRY?" it was the right pick for zulu, but without a half-cost building or melee/gunpower UU i'm not so sure. the amount of money it was saving me by the end was pretty nauseating, but in isolation i rate CHA the best military trait in generic circumstances just due to the dominance of the knight line of units

[Dreylin]

yeah, about 200 turns in when i saw ginger's army assembling for the invasion of drey i had this moment of horrible realization along the lines of "wait.... why on earth did i take AGG, which gets a third promo on melee and gunpowder, over CHA, which for the low low price of vassalage gets a third promo on CAVALRY?" it was the right pick for zulu, but without a half-cost building or melee/gunpower UU i'm not so sure. the amount of money it was saving me by the end was pretty nauseating, but in isolation i rate CHA the best military trait in generic circumstances just due to the dominance of the knight line of units

Oh wait, I have a picture for that!

[superdeath]

More or less: i didnt know you had gotten nukes THAT turn or were already building them. I grouped my shit together (and thought it was far enough away from those damn airships) because i wanted to stay within railroad range of hitting anything/everything. I hadnt noticed anything more than the Manhattan Project being finished. I was in a state of logging in, and basically ending the turn because no one seemed to want to stop you. And... Zulu was spending thousands of EP on me while keeping none on you. .. Slightly sour about stuff like that :P

[ljubljana]

Zulu was spending thousands of EP on me while keeping none on you

there's actually a really simple reason for this - nauf and mjmd had been friendly all game, so we were on 42/42 EP points (or close to it) and i wanted to keep it that way to avoid creating tensions before i wanted to fight them. meanwhile, ginger and i had hated each other all game and i kept trying to deescalate, and when we FINALLY stopped spending EP on each other, i really didn't want us to start down the path towards mutual suspicion again. and.... well, after scooter/gav was eliminated, you were the only player left who i didn't share a border with. the game doesn't let you waste your EP without putting them into anyone (i would have if i could), so if i didn't want to piss off any of my neighbors with EP spending, literally the only other thing the game would allow me to do was put them into you  so, sorry about that.... no hostility was intended, i promise

[Mjmd]

Airship vision is brutal and almost certainly too good. But ya ironically if you had just left your stacks where they were or just even moved the main stack 1 tile further away you might have been better off. Also if your 4th stack hadn't been in Civac land??? I'm super curious about that expedition.

In general I would love if recon missions could be intercepted.